Code migrations take many forms — from language rewrites to dependency or framework upgrades — and are rarely trivial, often requiring months of manual effort. One of our teams, when upgrading their .NET framework version, experimented with using AI to shorten the process. In the past, we blipped OpenRewrite, a deterministic, rule-based refactoring tool. Using AI alone for such upgrades has often proven costly and prone to meandering conversations. Instead, the team combined traditional upgrade pipelines with agentic coding assistants to manage complex transitions. Rather than delegating a full upgrade, they broke the process into smaller, verifiable steps: analyzing compilation errors, generating migration diffs and validating tests iteratively. This hybrid approach positions AI coding agents as pragmatic collaborators in software maintenance. Industry examples, such as Google’s large-scale int32-to-int64 migration, reflect a similar trend. While our results are mixed in measurable time savings, the potential to reduce developer toil is clear and worth continued exploration.
